Respirare la polvere Come Steve McQueen: Moltiplicare Amianto per fare dell’io un noi

This contribution focuses on the re-editions of Alberto Prunetti’s Amianto. Una storia operaia. This piece of autobiographical fiction recounts the death of Prunetti’s father due to his exposure to asbestos dust in the steel factories of the Peninsula, from Piombino to Casale Monferrato to Taranto where he worked as a welder. Prunetti writes his autobiographical novel from a “new” second-generation working-class perspective. This fulfills the double task of «avenging the father» and of «historicising» and «telling its story from within the class» (Prunetti). By taking a closer look at the reception of the work and its editorial reworkings with various publishing houses (Agenzia X, Alegre), this essay aims to investigate how the recirculation of the same narrative takes on the form of a denunciation in the prefigurative perspective of a memory for the future. The chapter Come Steve McQueen, added to the Alegre edition, plays a special role in the shift towards the creation of a collective imagination. This contribution demonstrates how, with successive rewritings of the Western episode, the comparison of «come» ‘how’ is transformed into a performative «noi» ‘we’ and, eventually, into an affiliative «co» of working-class co-creation. The comparative and transmedial reading of the photographs in the microhistory of Come Steve McQueen allows us to account for the performative potential of literature to create repertoires of action (Latour) and to establish, through the act of retelling, ever new links between memory and activism (Rigney).